


vow upon the river styx

by The-Immortal-Moon (LunaKat)



Series: Of Gearheaded Geeks and Alchemy Freaks (EdWin Week 2019) [7]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Childhood, EdWin Week 2019, F/M, Pre-Relationship, Prompt Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-07
Updated: 2019-05-07
Packaged: 2020-02-27 19:09:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18745300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LunaKat/pseuds/The-Immortal-Moon
Summary: For EdWin Week 2019. Day 7: PromiseHe promised, after all. And promises made on the river are always kept.





	vow upon the river styx

When they’re young, the world is small and confined to the grassy knolls of Risembool, to the evergreen hills and the wide pastoral skies and the vast stretches of farmland that make up patches of the countryside. To the south is the badlands of Ishval, fertile greenness transitioning into harsh, cracked earth that splits beneath the sun and smolders at your feet. To the north is the woods, thick and mysterious, fraught with terrors that most children are wise enough to shy away from. This makes Risembool an appealing middle ground.

Sometimes Ed drags them all down to the river though—the one that flows blue and swift as it carves through the valley, rushing softly as cattails bend precariously overs its waters, bracketed by a shore of soft silt. When the summer days are long and lazy, and they all having nothing much of anything to do, they’ll go there and sit down to observe the way the current parts around rocks that break the surface in smooth grey mounds. Ed like to pick the grass and throw it into the river to be carried away. Al always tells him to stop. Winry takes off her shoes and sinks her bare feet into the shallow end of the water, watching in fascination as it streams around her ankles while little minnows dart about in the banks.

She doesn’t really recall what the river is called. It must have a name, but she’s young and falls asleep in geography and Ed laughs mercilessly at her for it. She thinks Mom or Dad might have told her once, when they took her down for a riverside picnic when she was very, very young—but they aren’t here anymore, are off at the warfront helping people who need them, so here she is at the river, wondering about its name.

Once, in a fit of childish mischief that could be afforded to them because Aunt Trisha hadn’t yet passed away and Mom and Dad hadn’t yet gone away to the battlefield, Ed decided to declare it the River of Sticks. His reasoning for this was from an old tale his mother had told him about a mythical river where you made promises on it that could never be broken. Curious, Winry inquired what it was about the river that bound you to your words so, to which Ed shrugged and said it probably wasn’t the river at all, just that the people who made those promises stuck to it. Al had a counter-theory about the river being magic, which led to a twenty-minute debate upon the existence of magic as a whole before Ed huffed and Al threw his hands up and the subject was dropped and never revisited. Still, in her head, Winry will sometimes look out at the foam-white current as it swells around the rocks breaking its surface and think to herself  _this is the River of Sticks, where promises are made and kept_.

Then Aunt Trisha succumbs to influenza. Then Mom and Dad are called away to Ishval. Then they are alone and bereft and suddenly they have better things to do than play around at the riverbank, picking cattails to wave around like magic wands or splash in the shallows or just lie on the shore listening to the rush of water. They forget what it means to be children.

Perhaps, then, this is punishment—that is what Winry thinks as the rain pelts down relentlessly from the heavens, as the river surges with the swell of melted snow that came down from the northern mountains of Briggs and turned the once-placid current into this raging thing that now threatens to swallow the valley.

It’s the worst that anyone has ever seen the river behave, worst than its been in generations. That is what people shout as lightning flashes overhead and thunder rumbles and there’s a whine in the back of Winry’s throat as she searches the crowd for Ed and Al. She didn’t break a promise, or at least doesn’t think she did. But already the flooding has claimed the sprigs of cattails that line its banks and is lapping at the barricade made by frantic townsmen from sandbags and hard-packed mud to contain the swollen current. Perhaps it has decided that growing up is the same thing as reneging upon a forsworn oath.

She stands on the grassy knoll overlooking the river, rain battering her coat and the hood pulled up over her head. Water sloshes over the sandbags and spills over in flashes of white foam like a rabid animal at the mouth. Leaks burst out as clay and mud give away. People spring back to let out shouts of going to higher ground as they hasten away. Winry looks again for her friends but she can’t find them.

The River of Sticks is going to sweep them all away.

Then a woman comes and there’s alchemy and the river  _roars_  against the earthen wall she erects with the clap of her hands, but it doesn’t win. Silently, while relief suffuses through the townspeople, Winry wonders if that means it will retaliate on them later.

Later, the woman is set up in Mom and Dad’s clinic after coughing up blood. Winry stands at the front of the crowd as Ed and Al wrestle themselves free, crow about an apprenticeship and alchemy and at first the woman refuses, but then she relents. And it all happens so fast and Winry just blinks and then suddenly—

It’s the next day, and they’re packing up to leave.

“I’m gonna miss you guys,” she says to Ed after he comes back downstairs hefting a small travelpack. Al must be taking longer, or maybe he went back over to their own house to get some things. They’ve both mostly been bouncing back and forth between their residence and hers.

He only shrugs as he sets his things on the table, tapping his foot impatiently as he watches the door for his brother’s return. The woman and the man that are taking them away are waiting beyond the door, too. “We’ll be back,” he says, rather dismissively. “It’s only for a little while.”

Yeah, that’s what Mom and Dad said. Only “a little while” has been almost a year and a half now and they keep sending letters saying they love her and they miss her but not a single thing about when they’ll come home.

She bites her lower lip. Briefly pictures them disappearing like that, retreating into the horizon with their backs to her. It causes something in her chest to clench, like her ribcage has tightened and the curve of bone has ended up constricting her lungs. She doesn’t think she can bear them being gone for a whole year and half. But when she asked Al how long they were going to be gone, he shrugged and said longer than a month—that’s how long the lady said the trial period would be.

A whole month without seeing them...

Somewhere in her memory, she can still hear it—the sound of laughter on the riverbanks, picking cattails to toss into the current, splashing in the shallows, fishing for tadpoles in the summer.

Her hands curl into fists. “Promise.”

That, in the end, is what makes him look up and pay attention to her. “Huh?”

“Promise you’ll come back,” she says.

His brows pinch uncomprehendingly, like he doesn’t realize that just because he goes away that she won’t still be here. “Winry—”

“When you’re done your training,” she says, blinking at the itch in her eyes, refusing to cry because it’s not forever, of course it’s not, and besides, he always makes fun of her when she cries. Still, she sniffs. “Promise that you’ll come back. That—That you’ll  _always_  come back, whenever you go away.”

For a moment, his brows pinch further and he looks ready to fire off an insult—but then something twitches on his face, softens, has him looking away. It’s just then that she remembers his father disappeared too and never came back and he probably knows what it’s like to wait and wait until you just have to give up, because it hurts too much to wait now.

“Yeah.” His voice is surprisingly soft. “I promise.”

On a sudden impulse, Winry adds, “Swear it on the river.”

That has him looking a little puzzled, and she thinks that he must have definitely forgotten the childish proclamation he made back then, about the River of Sticks and how promises are kept upon it unfailingly. But he seems to recognize it as an extra assurance that she needs, so he shrugs and says, “I swear it on the river.”

Before she can say anything more, though, Al returns with a knapsack of his own, and then the woman knocks the crown of her knuckles on the doorframe while demanding loudly to know if Ed is ready. He retorts something grouchily back at her, before chirping a parting to Winry and Granny as they stand in the doorway, watching as the four of them disappear into the horizon. And yes, just as she thought, the image of their retreating backs over the hills is just as painful as she imagined it would be.

“Call!” she shouts after him, cupping her hands to her mouth. “Or at least write!”

All she gets in return is a wave of departure, then he disappears over the hills. It’ll probably be a while before she sees him again. Maybe it won’t even be until the end of summer. Maybe longer.

She won’t wait too long, though. He promised, after all. And promises made on the river are always kept.

And even if he does take a long time, she knows he’ll always come back.

**Author's Note:**

> This took a while to write, honestly. IDK.
> 
> That's it for EdWin Week 2019! Thank you all so much for reading!


End file.
